What is document management?
Document management provides complete management of the document life cycle. This includes everything from the design, to the production (on demand, interactive and mass), to the post production (e.g. sorting/grouping), to the delivery to any distribution channel and, last but not least, the final archiving of the documents. It’s an easy way to automate all processes related to the outgoing communication (printing, email, web publishing). The solution aims to streamline the production of documents from different core business applications.
A perfect answer to different challenges
The market has become more demanding, especially in terms of communication and documents. Your customers, vendors and partners expect a communication that’s digital, in line with the current trends, with a nice lay-out and a responsive design to meet their behavior of constantly switching between devices. It’s a huge internal investment to maintain such processes without any help from a CCM software.
Another challenge can be managing a high level of complexity in communications, for example, multi lingual content or the need to personalize content. Add in a high number of templates and you will soon have a difficult process assuring the quality of your documents and communications. Efforts to effectively maintain this huge template repository are enormous. The solution here is to move from static to dynamic templates. Such templates are created with reusable components. When there’s a maintenance action on all communications, it only takes a few minutes for the complete repository to be redeployed. Because of this same concept of reusability, the number of necessary templates can also be divided by 10. Instead of static document templates, choose dynamic ones for all communication no matter what the final distribution channel (printing, electronic or digital). It also empowers your employees. Without the help or assistance from IT, functional users can create their own templates. The purpose is to be more reactive as well as shorten the time to market.
Besides these factors, we see that many companies are still maintaining a legacy archiving application with poor added value to the digital document version. Documents are often stored at the end of the process where efficient document management requires capturing these at the first stage. With CCM you have the ability to formalize existing procedures.
Real-life examples
- You must customize and personalize your communication. Think of claim management in the insurance industry.
- Your business demands you send different types of communication at different levels of your business processes. For example, an insurance company, with multiple and complex variants of documents, contracts, green cards, claims, renewals, …
- You must be reactive. Think of a financing company with multiple changes of regulations during the year.
Ready for everything that’s on the way
Digital Document Management will transform in Digital Communication Management. A good DDM software should already manage communications, meaning that documents are now only a subtype of the entire communication spectrum. The future is to manage any type of communication (document, email, fax, SMS, social media posts, WhatsApp messages, …) by enabling a unique platform to catch any message coming in or going out. In addition to this, it should be possible to maintain an interactive communication with clients in the near future, an important part of a complete client centric approach. In the next decade we will have to face Artificial Intelligence. Communication will be generated using AI technology and your CCM tool needs to be ready for this.